CombatWombat

There’s a capital strike on, and you can’t simply withhold capital or else it is put to use elsewhere so it has to be employed for enshittification.

If you used Google Translate previously for translations, they’ve switched out the backend for Gemini. Most of the existing translation tools have been destroyed and replaced with LLMs already.

I mean, he definitely did it. We all remember the breathless coverage of his 2am ketamine tweets to manipulate the market:

Musk’s May 13 tweet — “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” — was “false because the buyout was not, in fact, ‘temporarily on hold,’” the lawsuit says. That’s because Twitter did not agree to put the deal on hold, and there was nothing in the merger agreement the two parties signed that allowed Musk to put it on hold, according to the lawsuit.

I wonder if he has enough clout left with the Trump admin to weasel out of this one, like he did with the Tesla deal.

If you create a new community and start up megathreads for big news events, people can vote with their feet (so to speak). Folks who don’t like them can keep posting to their communities, and folks who do can join yours. I like a megathread for folks who have a take on an event, but don’t care to read the particular article they’re commenting under — I totally get it can be tedious to read a bajillion articles on the same event just to participate in the conversation, but it’s also annoying for those of us who are interested in discussing the contents of a specific article. Megathreads seem like a good compromise that can make everyone happy, so long as you understand that your thread will not prevent other kinds of posts in other communities.

I’m not as quick as you. I got most of the way through article and was still wondering why X would expose a database of historical prompts to an llm for querying by law enforcement.

I mean, most llm makers work pretty hard to conceal the system prompt, and I have no idea why XAi would give Grok access to a database of historical prompts. LLMs don’t have memories by default, and their inability to learn from past experiences is kind of a big stumbling point for a lot of folks. You can ask, but I doubt you’re likely to get anything other than a confabulation.

I think I like the draft headline better, despite it’s clunkiness.

People commenting after only reading the headline and not the article is exactly the behavior I find irritating and distasteful about headline-related complaints.

I’m usually against complaints about poor headlines, but this one is completely factually incorrect? The FBI didn’t interact with Grok here literally at all? They issued a search warrant to X to get their logs?

My condolences for your loss.

Capricious is my favorite adjective, rather than trying to ascribe mental disorders to global systems. If you’re asking regarding a specific human, you should talk to a psychiatrist — if it is disruptive to their life, it may be a sign of borderline personality disorder.

This use of bipolar has very little to do with the experience of most bipolar people. Bipolar rapid cycling is defined as four episodes per year, much closer to the change of the seasons than the change of weather from day to day.

Ugh. Thanks for the heads’ up — I’ve definitely posted archive links without noticing they’re blocked before. PBS and NPR have really gone downhill with the budget cuts. ProPublica is great, but their coverage is pretty narrow, so there’s a lot of stories they don’t cover at all. It’s getting harder and harder to find a quality source.

I’m certain they’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and AI is a convenient way to justify it, rather than admitting they don’t want humans using it to circumvent the paywall. It does solidify for me personally that the LA Times is the paper of record for the United States going forward, rather than the New York Times.

Any good archiver will check for an archived copy before making a request, and batch requests. This was very different than the attack you’re imagining — if you opened any archive.today page, it would poll a developer’s personal blog, regardless of whether you were interacting with content from that blog.

Unfortunately, they’ve allegedly modified the contents of some archived articles, so even though they may do better to archive, nothing archived is of any value because it cannot be trusted.

It does more to handle client-side rendering than archive.org, so there are pages that could be rendered by today that were not archivable by org. Also, because of differing usage patterns, it has archives of pages that org didn’t, and even for pages that org does have, at times org doesn’t.

Deeply saddening. Archive.today was a great resource, and stored a vast repository of human knowledge. As the internet turns to slop, we need sites that preserve the history of the web more than ever, and it’s very disappointing that the team at archive.today has failed us so profoundly in our hour of greatest need.